Notes for this theme
Reading comfort
GRM 24.6
24.6 Mary says:
«God forgives him who acknowledges his sin, repents and confesses it with a humble and sincere heart. He does not only forgive, He rewards. Oh! How good is My Lord to those who are humble and sincere! To those who believe in Him, and trust in Him!»
GRM 26.8
Humility, as unrestricted as charity. You must admit that you can be faulty even in simple thoughts, and you must not be so proud as to refuse to say: ‘I made a mistake’, because such pride would be more harmful than the previous fault. Everybody makes mistakes, with the exception of God. Who can say: ‘I am never wrong’? And there is a more difficult humility: the one that knows how to keep silent about God’s wonderful things in us, when it is not necessary to proclaim them for His glory, so that we might not discourage our neighbour who has not received such special gifts from God. If He wants, oh! if He only wants, God reveals Himself in His servant! Elizabeth ‘saw’ Me for what I was, My spouse knew Me for what I was, when it was time for him to know.
Mary sets out the essential conditions for pleasing God and welcoming his continual coming into our hearts.
GRM 29.10-11
29.10 I defeated gluttony, both of knowledge and of enjoyment, by agreeing to know only what God wanted Me to know, without asking Myself or Him more than what I was told. I believed unquestioningly. I overcame the innate personal delight of enjoyment because I denied Myself every sensual pleasure. I confined flesh, the instrument of Satan, together with Satan, under My heel and made of them a step to rise towards Heaven. Heaven! My aim. Where God was. My only hunger. A hunger which is not gluttony, but a necessity blessed by God, Who wants us to crave for Him.
29.11 I defeated lust, which is gluttony carried to the extreme of greed. Because every unrestrained vice leads to a bigger vice. And Eve’s gluttony, which was already blameworthy, led her to lust. It was no longer enough for her to enjoy pleasure by herself. She wanted to take her crime to a refined intensity and thus she became acquainted with lust and was a mistress of lust for her companion. I reversed the terms and instead of descending I have always ascended. Instead of causing other people to descend, I have always attracted them towards Heaven: of My honest companion, I made an angel.
Now that I possessed God and His infinite wealth with Him, I hastened to denude Myself of it saying: ‘Here I am: may Your will be done for Him and by Him’. He is chaste who not only chastises his flesh but also his affections and his thoughts. I had to be the Chaste One in order to annul the One who had been Unchaste in her flesh, her heart and her mind. And I never abandoned My reservedness, not even by saying of My Son: ‘He is Mine, I want Him’, since He belonged only to Me on earth, as He belonged only to God in Heaven.
GRM 29.11
Every unrestrained vice leads to a bigger vice.
GRM 31.8-9
Rely peacefully on the word of him who guides you. And believe and obey his advice.
31.9 Obedience always saves you, even if the advice given to you is not completely perfect.
GRM 32.9
Consider that God gave Himself to obliterate Satan’s work in your souls. And will He not be able now to defeat the satans that torture you?
GRM 34.11
When one seeks God, natural habits must yield to superhuman considerations and necessities.
GRM 34.12
Their souls were accustomed to meditation and each of them had a most sensitive conscience, refined by constant attention, and by sharp introspection, which made of their interior a mirror from which even the slightest faults of daily actions are reflected. Their conscience has become their teacher, a voice that warns and cries not at the least error, but at the least inclination towards errors, at everything human, at the satisfaction of one’s ‘ego’. Consequently, when they place themselves before that teacher and that severe clean mirror, they know that it will not lie.
GRM 34.12
‘Oh! How sweet it is to feel that there is nothing against God in us! To feel that He is kindly looking at the soul of His faithful son and blesses him. Faith, trust, hope, strength and patience are increased by such a feeling. The storm is raging just now. But it will pass, because God loves me and He knows that I love Him, and He will not fail to help me again’. That is how those speak who enjoy the peace that comes from an upright conscience, that is the queen of every action of theirs.
GRM 35.7-8
(...) You are so hampered by your humanity — it really overwhelms your souls too much — that you cannot follow My ways and you fall; or you stop disheartened. You go on saying to yourselves and to those who would like to assist you, quoting the examples of the Gospel for you: ‘But Jesus, but Mary, but Joseph (and so on for all the saints) were not like us. They were strong, they were immediately comforted in their sorrow, also in the little sorrow which they experienced, they did not feel passion. They were already beings out of this world’.
35.8 That little sorrow! They did not feel passion!
Sorrow has been our faithful friend and it had all the most varied forms and names.
Passion… do not use a word wrongly, by calling passion the vices which mislead you. Be honest and call them ‘vices’, and capital ones in addition. It is not true that we did not know them. We had eyes to see and ears to hear, and Satan caused those vices to dance in front of us and around us, showing them to us with their heap of filth in action, or tempting us with his insinuations. But, since we firmly wanted to please God, his filth and insinuations, instead of achieving the purpose intended by Satan, obtained the very opposite. And the more he worked, the more we took shelter in the light of God, disgusted as we were with the muddy darkness he showed to the eyes of our bodies and of our souls.
But we did not ignore passions in our hearts, in their philosophical setting. We loved our country, and in our country we loved our little Nazareth above every other town in Palestine. We were fond of our house, of our relatives and friends. Why should we not? We did not become slaves to our feelings because nothing is to be our master except God. But our feelings were made good companions.
My Mother uttered a cry of joy when, after about four years, She went back to Nazareth and entered Her house, and kissed the walls where Her ‘yes’ had opened Her bosom to receive the Son of God. Joseph joyfully greeted his relatives and his little nephews, who had grown in numbers and in years, and he rejoiced when he saw that his fellow citizens remembered him and they sought him because of his ability. I Myself appreciated friendship and because of Judas’ betrayal, I suffered as for a moral crucifixion. And why not? Neither My Mother nor Joseph ever placed more love for their home or their relatives before the will of God.